Thoughts From Eric Archive

• One of Those Weeks was published on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Rants categories.
• There have been twenty-three replies.

Limited seating is now available for An Event Apart Seattle 2007, June 21-22, at Bell Harbor International Conference Center on breathtaking Puget Sound. Spend two days with leading designers, developers, and accessibility experts including (in alphabetical order)…

• Tim Bray, father of XML, director of web technologies at Sun Microsystems, and Tim Berners-Lee W3C appointee;
• Andy Budd, user experience lead at Clearleft, co-founder of d.Construct, and author of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions;
• Mike Davidson, founder and CEO of Newsvine, former art director and manager of media product development for ESPN and the Walt Disney Internet Group;
• Shawn Henry, director of education outreach for W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), research appointee at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and author of Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design;
• Shaun Inman, award-winning designer and developer, inventor of Inman Flash Replacement and the curiously successful stats package Mint;
• Jeffrey Veen, designer manager at Google, founding partner of Adaptive Path, and W3C invited expert on CSS before most of us knew the acronym;
• Khoi Vinh, design director at NYTimes.com, author of Subtraction.com, and former partner at Behavior LLC;

…plus Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman. A complete schedule is available for your perusal. The two days of design, code, and best practices, including lunch on both days and parties on both nights, go for $795 (reg. $895) if you register by May 21, 2007. An Event Apart Seattle 2007 will be our only show in the northwest this year. Seating is limited to 300 attendees and will sell out fast—they’re already going like hot cakes—so nudge that bean counter and come join us!

• AEA Seattle 2007 Now Open was published on Friday, March 16th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart and Speaking categories.
• There have been three replies.

Something for you 2007 SXSW Interactive attendees: if you need to get to the rooms-in-exile (8, 9, and 10), you can skip the line for the elevator.  Here’s how:

1. Get yourself to the ground floor.
2. Walk past the Lego®-infested play area and the fruit smoothie stand into the deserted hallway on the west side of the center, along Trinity Street.
3. Keep walking.  Just about the time you become convinced that you’ve gone entirely the wrong way, there will be an escalator.  Take it up.
4. And there you are.  There will be a badge checkpoint, although quite possibly one without a badge checker.  There wasn’t one at 9:55am this morning.

When you leave said rooms, you can go back by the same escalator or use the staircase near the elevators.  I’d recommend using the stairs to come up, except they’re locked to entry from the ground floor and I haven’t gotten my hands on any duct tape yet.  Ten community karma points to the person who hacks around this problem as well, though they’re a little bit harder to spot than the escalator.  Pass it on.

• Getting To the Other Part of SXSWi was published on Sunday, March 11th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been three replies.

For me, SXSW 2007 was over almost as soon as it started.  That’s because my one and only panel, “A Decade of Style”, was in the first Saturday morning slot.  It seemed to go pretty well, thanks to the great folks who agreed to be on the panel and some sharp audience questions.  Now I have nought to do but attend the sessions that seem the most interesting and catch up with some folks I haven’t seen in quite a while.

It’s great being here, and I love seeing everyone, but in all honesty I’m starting to think about leaving a day or three early.  I miss my wife and daughter.  A lot.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone I inadvertently ignored, insulted, or misidentified on Friday.  I was dead tired, having had to get up at 3:30am to catch the first leg of my trip to Austin.  As I’m sure you know, when the alarm goes off at 3:30am, it isn’t ringing at the end of a full night’s sleep.  In my case, not even close.

So I spent yesterday in kind of a moderate-functioning daze, and kept mistaking people for other people.  Three times (that I know of) I put the wrong name to a face, and these are people I’ve known for a while.  Seriously, at one point I identified Brian Alvey as Aaron Gustafson.  After I introduced him to someone else as Aaron, I then proceeded to talk with him about what he’s been doing at AOL and about his house in the suburbs of New York City.  After he excused himself to go grab something to eat, someone asked me who it was, and I told them it was Aaron and that I worked with him on A List Apart.  I swear this all made perfect sense to me at the time.  There was absolutely no sense of mental discontinuity whatsoever.

It was only two hours later, when I ran into Aaron at the Big Bag pickup desk, that I realized what had happened.  What went through my head was pretty much, “Hey, you’re… not who I was talking to earlier.”

So if I did something like that to you, I’m really sorry.  I got a ton of sleep last night and am now back to my usual level of not being able to remember people’s names.

• South by… What Was I Saying? was published on Sunday, March 11th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been five replies.

I know that you don’t need to be told this, but I’m just going to put this on record for anyone who might be Googling for the information in the future, not to mention the four separate people who got this wrong within the last 24 hours.  It’s like this:

My last name is spelled M-E-Y-E-R.  No trailing “s”; an “e” to each side of the “y”; no “a” anywhere within its bounds.  Got it?  Good!

Also, it’s “Eric” with a “c”, not a “k” or even a “ck”.  ‘kay?

So how does your name get misspelled, and how much does it bother you?

• What’s In a Name was published on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Humor and Rants categories.
• There have been one hundred thirty-five replies.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news to any potential AEA Boston attendees, but we sold the last available seat just before noon yesterday.  You can still get in touch to request a spot on our waiting list. if you like.  If not, there’s always the Seattle show coming in June, with tentative plans for two more shows by the end of 2007.

Some of you may recall that I prophesied, a few weeks back, that we’d sell out on February 28th—and so we did.  Go me.  I feel like a regular Edgar Cayce.

• AEA Boston Full Up was published on Thursday, March 1st, 2007.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart and Speaking categories.
• There have been three replies.

• MakeMeASpeaker

  This wiki is intended to be a place where those who are interested in becoming speakers (particularly, but not exclusively, in the web world) can come to get advice, mentoring and help. It is also intended to be a meeting place for those who are interested in helping others become speakers.

  On the same site: an evolving (and evolvable) page containing Advice.

• UltraNormal: How to Get to Speak at Web Conferences

  …some practical suggestions for folks who want to gain some confidence in their own speaking abilities and how I worked up to presenting at conferences… I’ve spoken at a bunch of conferences over the past year, and well, this might help someone.

• Bloggy Hell: Calling future speakers!

  Below are a list of some of the events which encourage people to get up and speak about what they love. The list is Australian-centric, mainly because that is the circles I hang with, but I would love to hear of similar things going on around the world…

• Speaking Assistance was published on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Web categories.
• There have been four replies.

• mezzoblue: Homogeneity?

  There’s really nothing in the post I don’t want to quote, but this bit in particular jumped out at me:

  …as a conference organizer, you tend to be conservative. You need to ensure a speaker list that will fill seats. This isn’t “we want to maximize profit” filling of seats either, this is “holy crap we just signed a contract that would put us out multiple tens of thousands of dollars if we don’t hit certain numbers”. When you book larger venues, you make commitments and really put yourself on the line financially. Those who haven’t run conferences simply can’t understand what a nerve-wracking experience this is.

• Brian Oberkirch: Identity Is a Mashup

  This is an ongoing debate (as it has to be) though the argumentation tends toward the self-righteous, self-evident mode: look at all these white boys on the roster. What are they thinking? I think we can do better. I think we have to do better.

  On that post, a comment by Derek Powazek

  One of the reasons I got very excited about the internet when I discovered it in the 90s was because, finally, here was a place where race, gender, and religion truly did not matter. Where you could succeed or fail on the strength of your ideas alone – not what color you were or what junk was in your pants.

  I still believe this to be true.

• Hamm on Wry: Post Gender Preferences

  I don’t see how being male, female, white, black, brown, purple, queer, asexual, cancerous, capricorn or a carrot would matter if you happen to also be a professional in the web-standards-meets-development world. I would, honestly, attend a speech given by a carrot if that carrot was recognized as a leader in the field. That’s what professional speeches are all about.

• Jason Friesen {dot} ca: Diversity Wars

  To me, this is the key to being race- and gender-neutral — actually not caring about a person’s race or gender, but simply whether they can contribute what is needed in a given situation.

• Adactio: The diversity division

  I firmly believe that conferences shouldn’t simply be mirrors for the Web business, reflecting whatever is current and accepted. A good conference can act as a force on the industry. Conference organisers have a great opportunity here and I think it’s a shame to see it wasted.

• Digital Web Magazine: Beyond the A-List, Diversity in the Web Community

  I am going to go out on a limb here and use smart mob mentality here. If you know of a web professional who is talented, has done some remarkable things, and should be speaking at some web design conferences by all means let us know…

• Meri Williams: Conference Diversity .. the Permathread Returns

  You never know, we might just change the world.

• Diverse Links was published on Monday, February 26th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Culture and Web categories.
• There have been twenty-two replies.